[bobboss]

Just received my Wester Digital 80 gig Caviar IDE hard drive. The install went well. I configured the jumpers - the computer recognizes the new drive as well as the original drive.

The Master Drive on this computer is the original 20gig Seagate. My intention is to keep it in place as the boot drive, with all applications on it. The new, larger Slave Drive will be my aquisition disk for video files.

When I open My Computer, the drive is present and listed as the D Drive. I did a Full Format and end up with a disk capacity of 8,167,424 bytes or 7.78MB.
What's the deal with that?

I went online with Gateway and the tech tells me that the larger drive always must be the Master. Is this so?? What am I doing wrong??

-bob

 

[johnwill]

Unless Gateway has done something really stupid with the BIOS, they're all wet! My guess is that your BIOS is old enough that it won't recognize anything larger than a 32gig drive correctly. Can you get an updated BIOS from Gateway for your machine?

 

[bobboss]

Actually - I managed to solve the problem, but am left wondering what the underlying issue was.

I had overlooked the floppy disk which was shipped with the drive - Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools. I ran the utility and bingo! all's well. Maybe some kinda BIOS work-around.

Back in September, I was having USB issues with my machine and Gateway replaced the MB under warranty. I see a BIOS upgrade is available on their web site for my machine - Oxnard Motherboard BIOS
0AAVWP08 dated 6/01. When I go to my BIOS set-up I see that I have BIOS OAAVWP13. If one is to think logically, it would appear that my version is actually newer.